Move, Inc. Hit By Major Denial Of Service Attack

Move, Inc., which runs realtor.com, the official site of the nation's realtors, and other big listing properties, was hit by a major distributed denial of service attack at midday on Tuesday, June 17. Most of its sites are still down as of 10:42 p.m. ET on Wednesday. [Update as of 15:00 ET June 19: Its sites were restoried but were hit again and are still only intermittently live.] Move finally put out a press release this evening after spending more than 24 hours working with cyberforensics and law enforcement teams to resolve the problem.

A spokesperson at Move said they had not yet determined motive, method, perpetrator or scope of the attack, but had not yet found any evidence that any data or content has been compromised. Despite a widespread love-hate relationship with realtors, no hacktivist group has claimed responsibility on
Twitter for the attack. Move says its network service providers are working quickly to resolve the outages.

Denial of service attacks are bad and getting worse by the month in number and ferocity. A DDoS attack orchestrates numerous computers to flood a Web site or Web application with requests and commands that overload its capacity and potentially knock it out of commission. Data onslaughts of 20 gigabits to 50 gigabits per second are now common. A handful of attacks each month now top 300 Gbps, way more than is enough to flatten a corporate network. A growing number of these big DDoS attacks are being used as diversionary tactics to go after more sensitive data like passwords, intellectual property or credit card numbers, in a scheme known as smokescreening.

Move gets 28 million monthly unique users. Its first quarter 2014 revenue was $58 million, up 7%. Last year's revenue was more than $227 million. Shares have risen sharply recently on a rebound in the housing economy.